Houdini Technical Director

Swaybox Studios is hiring a Houdini Technical Director to join their VFX pipeline team in New Orleans, LA. This role sits at the intersection of technical development and production support, responsible for building and maintaining the Houdini tools, HDAs, and procedural workflows that artists across VFX, animation, and technical direction departments depend on daily. It’s the right fit for a TD who gets genuine satisfaction from solving hard pipeline problems and sees artist-friendly tooling as a craft in itself.

About the Role

The Houdini Technical Director at Swaybox Studios works directly within the VFX pipeline, reporting to the VFX Supervisor on a high-profile animation project developed in collaboration with DC Studios, Warner Bros Pictures Animation, and Matt Reeves’ 6th and Idaho production company. Day to day, this means building and debugging procedural networks, writing VEX expressions, maintaining HDA structures, and working alongside pipeline developers to keep a hybrid production environment running cleanly across Houdini and Unreal. The role demands someone who can move between deep technical problem-solving and cross-department communication without losing either thread.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, maintain, and optimize custom Houdini Digital Assets, procedural tools, and VFX pipeline scripts that improve artist efficiency and uphold production standards.
• Design scalable procedural systems supporting simulation, environment generation, geometry processing, lighting, and rendering workflows across the production.
• Build and maintain non-destructive scene-graph pipelines and author custom operators for direct artist use.
• Implement naming conventions, asset organization standards, version control practices, and pipeline integrations aligned with the studio’s production infrastructure.
• Troubleshoot technical issues across Houdini tools, simulations, caching, rendering, and pipeline integration, serving as the primary technical resource for the artist team.
• Automate manual production tasks and identify bottlenecks in existing post-production workflow to improve throughput across departments.

What You Bring

• Proven experience as a Houdini TD on feature film, animation studio, or high-end VFX productions.
• Deep working knowledge of HDA development, VEX, Python scripting, and node graph architecture within Houdini.
• Hands-on experience integrating Houdini into a broader VFX pipeline, including Unreal Engine workflows.
• Ability to communicate technical constraints clearly to artists and supervisors without oversimplifying.
• Experience with version control systems and asset management practices in a production context.

Why This Role

Swaybox Studios is producing work at the feature animation level in partnership with major studio and production company collaborators, which puts this Houdini Technical Director role on a project with genuine reach and visibility. New Orleans offers a real production community and the studio is building a pipeline infrastructure that this person will have direct influence over. This is an onsite, full-time position, not a contract engagement.

Apply now for the Houdini Technical Director position at Swaybox Studios and bring your pipeline expertise to a production that’s doing something genuinely different.